The present invention relates to an apparatus for recovering the trouble of an information processor that provides information communications services such as WEB services or task services. Particularly, the present invention relates to a failure recovery apparatus having a failure-resistant function that detects a failure state and executes a countermeasure command.
The information communications services, such as information services or sales of commodities, through communications networks have rapidly increased their applications because the promotion of business efficiency or attentive user service can be provided with less restriction of time or distance. The increasing application range leads to a significant impact when the computer providing those services fails. For that reason, there is a large concern about the failure-resistant property of the system.
A first conventional art regarding a failure recovery apparatus is disclosed in the patent document 1 (Japanese Patent Publication No. Hei 7-54474). In the first conventional art, at least one failure countermeasure rule, in which a priority is attached to each type of failure, is stored in a rule storage. When a failure occurs in an objective device, a countermeasure command corresponding to the type of the generated failure, in a failure countermeasure rule, is taken out of the rule storage. Until the failure is recovered, countermeasure commands in the failure countermeasure rules having a high priority are executed sequentially, repeatedly, and automatically.
A second conventional art similar to the first conventional art is disclosed in the patent document 2 (Japanese Patent Laid-open Publication No. Hei 8-221295). However, in the second conventional art, a suitable countermeasure method is exhibited to an administrator through the interface screen and the administrator manually performs an actual countermeasure. Moreover, in the second conventional art, the manual work is performed with the administrator's judgement and a countermeasure linked for recovery can be added as a countermeasure effective to the type of a current failure to a rule storage.
The failure recovery apparatus according to the first conventional art works effectively to failures described in the failure countermeasure rules but is totally ineffective to other failures. As seen in the second conventional art, a typical approach to solving such a problem is that a countermeasure for recovery is added as a countermeasure effective to a current failure to a rule storage, with an administrator's judgement, to expand the failure countermeasure rule. However, such an approach requires an administrator having enough knowledge and experiences and imposes an administrator's effort. Moreover, it is difficult to obtain the countermeasure commands effective to all types of failure in advance through experiment because of factors such as time and cost. Particularly, because the type of failure becomes enormous if failures of constituent elements of a low versatility, such as application programs designed respectively, are included, it is difficult to obtain the effective countermeasure commands in advance.